Interestingly, quite a number of countries have compulsary voting. According to this list, at least 15 countries have a fine for not voting, and in 3, you can actualy be imprisioned for it. This seems tantamount to handing out goodies in the voting booths.

As to your first point, there's little way to tell the difference between somebody voting randomly and somebody voting intelegently. I'm told that there are some statistical analisies performed to catch potential votebots, however I can't discuss the details (because I don't know them).

Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

Well, to be pedantic, not all of the countries mentioned
have compulsary voting. Belgium for instance require you
to show up at the voting station, but you don't actually
have to cast a legal vote. Still, it's a short list, most countries
don't have mandatory voting, and it's certainly not uniformly
accepted to be a good thing.

Well, the server on the business end of that link seems
to be operating in full stealth mode at the moment, but
the basic problem with mandatory voting is that a certain
percentage of people don't give a rat's hind end and
*you* *can't* *make* *them* care*.
Consequently, since they
won't ever take the trouble to vote intelligently
(even for the lowest definitions of intelligence), any
vote you force them to cast is random and so tends to
favor the worse or less popular option. This wouldn't
be a big deal if it were .05% of the population, but
it tends to be somewhat higher than that.

Don't get me wrong, voting is good. You want everyone
to know about their legal right to vote, to know what
day is election day, and to know where they have to
register (and by when) and where they have to show up
on election day to vote. That's all fine. But (to
paraphrase a certain infamous sports figure) if the
people aren't gonna come to the booth, how you gonna
stop 'em?

Bringing it back to Perlmonks... I don't think we
have that great a problem, because the people who
don't care are generally not going to spend a lot
of time visiting the site in the first place.
The XP "goodies" we're handing out for voting would
generally not be a compelling thing for people who
aren't really interested in the content of the site.
I don't see it as a big issue here.